My parents sent me a great essay from the New Yorker. Fittingly, they sent it as a page torn out from the magazine through the postal mail.

1992 House (no link, as the article isn’t freely available online)

“The assignment for Mrs. Stanfill’s eighth-grade social-studies class was to pick a year in U.S. history and live for a week as if it were that year, without any of the conveniences available in today’s modern society. I chose 1992, and for extra credit, I persuaded my family to participate in the experiment along with me….

My brother Chris was the most reluctant to participate in the project…. He has a massive DVD collection, which was out of bounds, too, given that DVDs had not been invented in the olden days of 1992. Though Chris has an abiding attachment to one of the girls on ‘The Real World: Philadelphia,’ I told him that, for the sake of historical verisimilitude, he had to learn to live without her – and his TiVo or his iPod - for a week….

Since the Internet was not in common use back then, Larry needed to check his stocks in the newspaper, which he had to start buying at Starbucks because he usually reads the news online. Thank God Starbucks was around in 1992. (I think. Not sure, and, under the terms of the experiment, I couldn’t Google it.)….

So, to keep the integrity of the research project intact, I denied [my Mom’s] request and called Dr. Mussman (on a landline – duh!) to cancel her appointment. By the time she found and called Dr. Mussman back, the slot was filled, and my mom and I became engaged in a significant altercation…. My mother wanted to punish me by depriving me of something that I care about, but just about everything that’s important to me was basically already off limits for the week anyway.

I learned that one of the biggest hardships endured by people back in 1992 was not being able to use cell phones. I had thought that maybe I could just cut back on the number of calls I made, thinking that usage plans were more limited. However, my research (at the library!) unearthed the fact that cell phones really were only humongous car-phone versions, prevalent among early executives in the hip-hop industry….

Not having the use of a cell phone piqued my curiosity regarding how schoolchildren communicated all those years ago. Since my mother was not speaking to me and Larry wasn’t around (he did end up going to Myrtle Beach), I turned to primary sources (in the form of classic cinema) for answers. I found ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Pretty in Pink’ in the library – on videotape. I learned that back in the eighties and nineties students would hand-write things on little pieces of paper called ‘notes’ and try to pass them to each other in class without getting caught….

In conclusion, 1992 was clearly a very confusing, difficult time in which to live in the United States of America….” [The New Yorker, January 17, 2005, issue, p. 49]

You really do have to read the whole thing, so if you’re not a subscriber, contact your local library to get a copy! Normally I would say don’t forget to check out your library’s web site, as you can often access the full-text of articles from home. If your library subscribes to one of these databases, you have a chance of being able to read the essay eventually, as this issue doesn’t seem to be available online quite yet.

Here’s the punchline, though. As I was reading the essay, the kids came home and Kailee excitedly told me how today her class had watched a video of President Bush’s inauguration. We talked about it for a while, and then I asked how they had watched the video, wondering if the teacher had grabbed a webcast. But no, Kailee said a relative of her teacher had recorded it on video and lent it to her, which really surprised Kailee. She didn’t know you could record onto videotape, because she has grown up with digital video recorders (DVRs) in the house. She then proceeded to tell me her theory that the relative must have set up a video camera in front of the TV and pointed it at the screen in order to capture the video, even though the whole setup sounded rather silly. She laughed and laughed and laughed at that thought.

Kids.